Although there are no souls or nonphysical minds, no immutable selves, although there is no such thing as free will, there are still, at the end of the day, persons. What is a person? A conscious social animal that deliberates, reasons, and chooses, that is possessed of an evolving or continuous—but not a permanent or immutable—identity, and that seeks to live morally and meaningfully.

-Owen Flanagan, “The Problem of the Soul”

There is a pervasive problem: even in social circles where biological evolution is an established scientific truth, few want to apply it to any area above the neck. It is as if nature took a holiday when it came to the brain or mind and said to itself, sorry, that’s too complicated, I’ll leave it alone and let the ephemeral take over. Within Western Christianity, this often manifests in references concerning the imago dei, or “image of god” as it alludes to the mind or seat of the soul or intellect, where we may receive all new bodies but retain our soul/mind. Within secular communities, typically more liberal politically, this avoidance of the brain/mind as operating under evolutionary constraints like the rest of the body, manifests in variations of declaring that social constructionism, the malleability of the person through social means, and, particuarly in more recent days, the elevation of individual thought as lived experience capable of transcending human bias by virtue of possessing one or another immutable characteristic considered sacred through pereceived oppression. Regardless of the source for one’s capacity to transcend the immediately material, soul or personal declaration, the result is an impressively naive abnegation of interpersonal influences and a tendency to ignore the innate biased qualities of cognition in favor of identity-based righteousness.

“We are not like them” is truly the mentality that unites everyone.

Except, despite the desire to remove oneself from the natural world in ways that support one’s desired social exclusionary conclusions, none have actually done so. We are all, every one of us, embodied and embedded in natural systems that we are incapable of seeing our way out of. Case in point: attempt to choose the next thought/emotion you have. Seriously. Try it. You are now having the thought of choosing the next thought. Right. Did you choose that thought though? At what point do you stop and humbly acknowledge that the thoughts/emotions providing the substance of what you consider to be your experience are just appearing seemingly from nowhere, and certainly not without any conscious deliberation? How far will you go to deny this fundamental aspect of human experience, that we do not choose what to think, only that once thought has appeared do we have a limited capacity of influencing what we then do with it?

Consciousness, whatever it may be (the jury is still very much in deliberation), could be many things, but it isn’t magic. It does not remove us from the natural order of things, of a cause/effect universe. There are undoubtedly more things in the totality of reality than are currently dreamed up in our philosophies (thank you, Hamlet), and certainly the simplicity of singular cause to singular effect is an insufficient framework for understanding reality, but the complexity only increases the burden of accepting that we are, every one of us, biological creatures and but one of a virtually infinite manifestation of natural reality, constrained by the specifics of our species’s character.

Just What Is It To Be Human?

Just what is it, then, to be human? We cannot help but act, as even the activity of being silent in contemplation is still a behavioral manifestation of our biology. So the real question isn’t what we do, but in what direction are we going? It’s a question that comes up often in my work in mental health: the issue of motivation, which is often framed as a problem of getting started, as if the person hasn’t already engaged in the behavior. What I immediately reframe is that instead of getting started, the inquiry should be about identifying which direction has already been engaged in and, depending on the consequences of said behavior, determine whether that is still acceptable or if change is desired.

This focus on direction is better captured by the Latin word vitae. Meaning life, vitae captures the inherent movement quality that life embodies. To be absent of vitae is to be absent of life, of movement, i.e., to be dead. This is why arbor vitae, or “tree of life,” is such a beautiful metaphor for the interconnectivity of biological evolution. It is the movement of biological processes, manifesting in the variety of species' development, as each seeks, through various means, to grasp the ongoing need to perpetuate itself.

Vitae is closely connected to the Greek physis, or nature, from which we also get the term psyche or soul, though an astute observer will also note the etymology of psyche being foundational to psychology. More on that in a moment.

While it is standard since Descartes, and to some degree earlier, to differentiate nature and soul as metaphysical opposites or as pertaining to different substances, i.e., the natural and the supernatural, historically the separation was not so clean. (The following is taken from Cornford’s “From Religion to Philosophy”). Anaximander, one of the great thinkers of the Milesians and associated with pre-Socratic philosophy, speculated on nature, but modern thinkers would not find much to compare it to easily, despite using the same word. The Milesians were known for the phrase “the All is alive” as a way to declare that the universe has a “soul” in it. Again, despite its use, “soul” is not meant to convey the same meaning people today often use it for, as it now carries so much reflective baggage of post-Enlightenment thinking. By “soul,” what was meant was more simply to be alive, to move, as in nature is self-moving and therefore alive. This is why there is so much overlap in the use of the term vitae, as the Greeks sought to capture life as an animating principle, not simply to refer to it in the reductionist and yet still very useful way as “matter” in the later Newtonian sense.

Now we return to what it means to be human, as we reflect on our physis and the vitae of our inevitable movement as living creatures. We are possessed of an animating principle where we are not passive creatures but meaning-making conscious manifestations of nature’s variability. To paraphrase Carl Sagan: we are the universe experiencing itself.

Demystifying the Spiritual

To be a meaning-making creature does not require a well-considered and academically rigorous ideological structure. At its most basic level, meaning-making is simply the connective tissue between consciousness and ongoing activity, between the individual and the interconnected variables that make up our constantly evolving context that we find ourselves embedded within. In my work with others, and as a philosophic principle for myself, this is boiled down to how Values are supported in action. As previously stated, it is not so much whether any of us are moving, but in what direction we are doing so.

As biological creatures, we are always constrained by the limits of our resources, and the need to use them in efficient ways. The surplus of neurons that contribute to our conscious lives provides us with a capacity to imagine futures less restrained by mere instinct. This provides a means of both contemplating and planning for an expanding number of possibilities, though this also is a double-edged sword for sowing discord in ourselves and with others as we then act on that imagined future as if it were in the present.

This capacity for imagining futures, of predictively processing possibilities, is what sets us apart within the animal kingdom. We do so through beliefs or psychological constructs, mental associations that are contextually determined to guide our activity within social interactions, connecting us with the ever-collapsing future that we call the present. It is impossible to contain the totality of nature’s variables in our brains, and therefore this biological constraint or limitation means we are forever creating constructs that serve our human purposes. We cannot stop ourselves from always picking and choosing parts of reality to fit what is useful in reaching outcomes we believe are helpful. This isn’t something we remove ourselves from. At best, through reflection, dialogue, and psychological tools like ideologies or worldviews, we develop better ways of funneling the immensity of natural reality into increasingly more productive and ethical ways of living, but we are none of us able to remove ourselves from our embodied nature.

In this light, the usage of spirituality can be simply a recognition of our vitae, our animating principle. It is the acknowledgment that we are not passive recipients of nature’s information, but active co-creators of meaning. This does not require the additional complication of a supernatural, as what we are does not require anything more than the natural for the manifestation of meaning, the development of purpose, and the active involvement in community-building.

The aversion many have within secular communities to the use of spirituality is a legitimate hangover from the limitations and destructive qualities that dogma placed on it. Thankfully, we are not beholden to those former constraints. Neither you nor I must give up the notion of community despite previous dogmatic assertions to “not forsake the assembly,” any more than any of us need give up contemplations of ethics despite previous authoritarian demands to adhere to rigid hierarchies.

What binds us all together in this human endeavor is a bone-deep need to connect our actions to a meaningful structure beyond our immediate selves, to identify how what we do in the present connects us to our imagined futures. None of us are removed from this need, and despite an ongoing cognitive illusion regarding our capacity to transcend our natural world, our brains are as much a part of it as our stomachs and spleens.

Rather than running away from the use of the term “spiritual” as a stand-in for directed purpose, we can use it, like any other verbal tool, to direct our attention to the process we are constantly engaged in: meaning-making. And if you still don’t like the term, that’s ok too. Use another. That’s the beauty of life; it isn’t reduced to one form.

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Sometimes to really get to know someone, you need to get past the formalities, the assumptions, and the internet insanity, and just have a conversation. That’s what I found in talking with Brit Hartley, Religious Deconstruction Coach from No Nonsense Spirituality.

Brit’s dedication is to exploring the human experience without relying on dogmatism or authoritarian ideologies, and supporting people in their journeys for self-discovery. We talk about that need, and the antipathy some have, particularly in secular circles, to anything that smacks of religiosity, even as that fear cuts people off from the many nuances of human experience and the bonds we are all seeking to build.

As Brit notes on her site, in describing the service she provides:

• No belief required - We can explore spirituality, meaning, ritual, and connection without asking you to believe things you do not believe.

• Deconstruction without demolition - We look honestly at what religion harmed, what it gave you, and what you want to carry forward.

• Psychology before Theology - We explore the human needs beneath belief: belonging, identity, certainty, purpose, morality, and connection.

• Meaning that fits your actual life - Rather than replacing one rigid system with another, we build a framework that reflects your values, personality, relationships, and lived experience.

As the conversation shows, I could not agree more and find that what is important in creating a life of active meaning-making is to move forward with what you’re for, what I refer to as values, rather than losing yourself in the destructive battle of what you’re against.

I hope you enjoy the free-flowing chat as much as I did, and definitely check out Brit’s work.

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Genuine self-knowledge is, no doubt, exceptionally difficult to attain, and the truth about what we are may certainly be distressing. In our efforts to conduct our lives successfully, however, a readiness to face disturbing facts about ourselves may be an even more critical asset than a competent understanding merely of what we are up against in the outside world. -Harry G. Frankfurt, “On Truth”

Self-knowledge is not, contrary to how it may at first intuitively follow, simply a matter of paying attention to your thoughts. This is because your thoughts are not under the control of any “you” that sits there in the center of the mind, pulling strings like Loki at the end of the fabulously well-done series of the same name. There is no “you” that is the master of your domain, or any domain for that matter. Instead, you are a perspective on those thoughts, reflecting on them but never choosing them, quite often showing up like uninvited guests at a party you threw together at the last minute.

Pause for a minute and try to choose your next thought. Did it work? Did you select one from a myriad of possibilities? What about the thought that was supposedly thinking about the choosing? Did you select that one? Or have they all just been popped into existence, one by one, never stopping, never ceasing? Even when you’re unconscious, thoughts don’t stop, creating, whether you recollect them or not, fantasy worlds of connections bound by rules you don’t have access to nor choose to adhere.

All of this should result in a level of humility, yet quite often we bring hubris to the experience of our lives. We declare our allegiance either to the belief that the uncontrollable is beyond control or to the egoism that believes every thought is sacred and important.

This presentation seeks to address that hubris and remind us that just because it’s in our heads, it doesn’t mean we have to take it seriously. In fact, it’s likely better if you don’t more often than not.

Read more

Guest post by Jill Palmer

For busy professionals, caregivers, and community members trying to make steady decisions in everyday life, an unpredictable world can turn simple plans into moving targets. The core tension is clear: constant change demands attention, yet the mind has limits, and managing uncertainty can slide into overwhelm. Mental resilience is the capacity to stay functional under pressure and recover momentum after setbacks, and future-proofing the mind means strengthening that capacity before challenges arrive. With the right adaptability skills, general readers can respond to disruption with steadier judgment and more consistent follow-through.

Understanding Resilience as Adaptability

At its core, resilience is not toughness at all costs. It is the flexible skill of staying open to change, meeting uncertainty with curiosity instead of fear, and learning as you go. A practical starting point is the idea that adaptability means you can adjust to new conditions without losing your sense of direction.

This matters because rigid thinking turns surprises into crises. When you treat unknowns as information to gather, you make calmer choices and recover faster after mistakes. Over time, lifelong learning helps build the mental flexibility that keeps you effective under pressure.

Picture a sudden shift in work priorities. Fear says, “I’m behind,” but curiosity asks, “What changed, and what’s the next best move?” You adapt by updating your plan, asking one clarifying question, and building one new skill. That same approach becomes especially real during career changes and barriers at work.

Turn Career Upheaval Into a Resilience Training Ground

Career shifts, whether chosen or forced, can become a practical workout for resilience because they require you to stay steady while the “rules” change. Each transition asks you to tolerate uncertainty without freezing, to treat the unknown as information you can learn from, and to keep your identity flexible enough to spot new opportunities rather than cling to a single path. That mindset naturally strengthens continuous learning: you update skills, rethink what you’re good at, and remain open to roles you might not have considered when conditions were more predictable.

This matters because research suggests that as burnout and dissatisfaction rise, many employers are emphasizing external hiring over developing the talent they already have. The result can be widening skills gaps and fewer growth pathways, pressures that affect workers and organizations alike.

Everyday Habits for a Future-Proof Mind

These habits turn resilience from a nice idea into a trainable skill. When you practice them consistently, you build mental flexibility that holds up through surprises, setbacks, and big life changes.

Three-Breath Reset

● What it is: Pause, take three slow breaths, and unclench your jaw and shoulders.

● How often: Daily, before difficult conversations or decisions.

● Why it helps: It interrupts stress autopilot and restores clearer thinking.

Name the Feeling, Choose the Next Step

● What it is: Label the emotion, then pick one helpful action you can do in 10 minutes.

● How often: Daily, whenever you feel stuck.

● Why it helps: It builds emotional agility instead of avoidance.

Two-Line Learning Log

● What it is: Write what worked today and what you will try next time.

● How often: Weekly.

● Why it helps: It turns setbacks into usable feedback.

One Reach-Out Message

● What it is: Send a check-in text or voice note to someone you trust.

● How often: Three times per week.

● Why it helps: Supportive relationships buffer stress and widen perspective.

The “Good Day” Micro-Optimism Prompt

● What it is: Ask, opening the door just a crack as your cue, “What could make today okay?”

● How often: Daily, especially on hard mornings.

● Why it helps: It nudges realistic optimism without denying problems.

Resilience Questions People Ask Most

Q: What does “future proofing your mind” actually mean?
A: It means building skills that help you adapt when plans change, not trying to predict every problem. Look for faster recovery, clearer choices under pressure, and fewer spirals after a hard moment. Pick one practice and measure progress by how quickly you return to your baseline.

Q: How do I stay consistent when life gets chaotic?
A: Reduce the habit until it fits your busiest day, then keep that version. Tie it to something already reliable, like brushing your teeth or starting the car. Consistency comes from making the action easy to start, not from willpower.

Q: When I miss a day, should I start over?
A: No. Treat it as a data point, not a failure, and restart with the smallest next step. A quick note about what knocked you off track can help you prevent the same snag next week.

Q: How do I know if these practices are improving my mental health?
A: Track one simple signal for two weeks, like sleep quality, irritability, or how long it takes to calm down after stress. Research links resilience with both negative indicators of mental health and positive indicators of mental health, so small gains are meaningful. If your signals worsen for several weeks, consider extra support.

Q: Can I build resilience if I feel anxious or overwhelmed most days?
A: Yes, and starting small is often the safest approach. Begin with one calming action that helps quiet your mind such as slow breathing, a short walk, or a brief meditation. If anxiety feels unmanageable or includes thoughts of self harm, reach out to a professional right away.

Commit to Lifelong Adaptability Through Resilience and Learning

Change will keep testing attention, confidence, and emotional balance, and the hardest part is staying steady when progress feels uneven. The goal is not perfect control, but lifelong adaptability built through an ongoing learning mindset, supportive connections, and regular mental strength reinforcement. Over time, this approach improves future readiness by making setbacks informative rather than defining, and by motivating mental growth instead of avoidance. Resilience is a practice of adapting, not a performance you pass or fail.

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David

The fundamental nature of mental health therapy, and I would argue, mental health itself, is that of interconnection. Relationships aren’t just what we pursue for intimacy, marriage, friendship, and professional growth, but are the foundational building blocks of how we create and derive meaning/purpose from life. For many, the professional relationship found in mental health counseling is a nearly sacred thing, reminiscent of the one found with one’s local priest and the sacred space of the confessional. Indeed, I would argue, and often do, that therapy is the secular equivalent of the role that a priest/reverend/pastor used to take, but as Western civilization, and more specifically the United States, moves away from identifying with a specific religious group (not to be confused with giving up religious ideas), mental health therapy has filled the void left.

How mental health has supplanted religious ideology with a secularized structure for deriving meaning in life is the subject of another time, but it does point to a reason why people find any encroachment by technology into it so objectionable. The sacred is not to be touched, and certainly not by the inhuman advent of Artificial Intelligence.

For years, therapists have been lamenting the commodification of therapy, derisively looking at companies like BetterHelp and others as leeching off the public and not giving therapists their due. Given the overwhelming majority of therapists being identified with liberal, or, more accurately, progressive, political ideology, part of the criticism typically involves some vague declaration that “capitalism” is harming everyone involved. The amusing part here is that therapists are among the most vociferous users of capitalist principles, seeking to keep supply down to increase demand and, therefore, increase prices. Therapists typically see clients only 15-25 hours per week when they’re independently running their own business, meaning that to make enough to live a small six-figure life, they have to charge approximately $200/hour. Additionally, the usual frequency of therapy is weekly, and it’s not unusual to continue for years. This means there are a few hours a week for therapists to see people, and they fill those hours with a select group of people who can afford it, which lets them raise their own prices even as the majority of people scramble to be helped.

The cultural milieu in which all of this is occurring is one that, encouraged by therapists and the industry as a whole, calls upon everyone to engage in therapy as the means for addressing any and all aspects of human experience (there’s that religious association again). Companies like BetterHelp, which face several legitimate criticisms, are simply addressing the need created by therapists and the broader industry. If every part of human experience is increasingly pathologized, and the only way to address that supposedly brokenness is through the sacred teachings as expressed in therapy, and that therapy is increasingly only provided by an expensive, narrow elite class, then it’s little wonder that companies have grown to meet that social need.

Therapy wasn’t commodified by these companies; it was already commodified by an educated class that declared to everyone that humanity itself is a problem, and that the only solution is attending a weekly service delivered by a state-sanctioned (i.e., licensed) officiant.

The AI Pushback

The increasingly shrill declarations against AI by the therapeutic industry are one of deep hypocrisy. An increasing number of therapeutic notes are being written not by therapists but by AI bots, specifically designed to gather information and present it in a structured format for diagnostic and insurance purposes. I’ve shaken my head in self-critical laughter at an industry that uses AI to write notes and treatment plans, only for insurance companies to then audit those notes and treatment plans with AI as well, effectively making it so that a practice built on the many variations of human connection devolves into computer programs making sure everyone is speaking the same language.

Beyond hypocrisy, the criticism of using AI in therapy would be more valid if the focus were grounded in efficacy. Instead, it’s about the fear of being supplanted. It’s about the fear of finding out that an industry built on standardization and rote delivery of interventions, where a lack of critically informed scientific and philosophical understanding of human nature is a feature rather than a bug, is not actually delivering on its promise. If an AI chatbot, or some variation, can deliver an equivalent level of reflective engagement, and the client/patient feels heard and helped, and it doesn’t cost them the equivalent of a small mortgage payment, who is going to be against this? Rather, who is going to be against this, whose real concern is diminishing human suffering?

The proverbial cat is out of the bag on many of the criticisms because they aren’t about efficacy. Instead, they’re focused on attempting to curtail therapy to only that which can be done directly by humans. This is an extension of how therapy is already defined, by the way.

The American Psychological Association (APA) defines psychotherapy as:

Psychotherapy is a collaborative treatment based on the relationship between an individual and a psychologist.

To attempt to clarify, the APA stipulates that psychotherapy “involves communication between patients and therapists that is intended to help people.”

“Intended to help” is the therapeutic version of “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Notice that nothing here has anything to do with specific interventions, modalities, or theoretical orientations. What is therapy? Effectively? That which occurs between the state-sanctioned therapist and patient. That’s it. Outside of ethical violations, which are very narrowly construed (for good reason), almost anything that occurs between a therapist and a patient is therapy.

Now, there is, of course, a great deal to be said about whether what occurs in therapy is actually therapeutic. A great many of my own clients have found me precisely because previous therapist interventions were emotionally and relationally destructive, and they’re looking for someone who has a healthy critical skepticism of modern therapy practices, and doesn’t think pathologizing normal human expression is a good thing. However, the APA and the ACA are not primarily in the business of policing their industry. This is where many conversations between therapists turn into pissing contests about what is and isn’t therapy, when what they likely mean is “therapeutic,” but saying so wouldn’t address what’s at issue: creating barriers to access.

So if therapy is merely a professionally sanctioned relationship, then what happens if the techniques and interventions can be distilled to a programmatic relationship delivered through a screen?

AI is the Therapist You’ve Been Looking For

Amusingly, and I’m not sure yet whether I’m laughing in genuine humor or horror, the American Psychological Association wants us to be afraid of AI, very afraid. To that end, they recently released a set of statements on social media warning of the supposed dangers of AI.

The problem? Almost everything the APA says that AI does is what the human therapist does. Below are the posts, with my comment in pink.

The irony here is pretty amazing. In attempting to scare people away from AI, the APA has instead succeeded in saying that the real problem is therapy. Of course, they don’t mean therapy, because again, therapy is only that which occurs “between an individual and a therapist,” so by definition, an AI can’t give therapy.

But what if it’s therapeutic? That’s the really difficult question to ask, isn’t it? Can a conversation with an AI be therapeutic? Does it, by the perception of the individual, provide support and help in times of distress? Increasingly, people are saying it does.

Whether something is helpful is a complicated question, worth far more exploration than I have room for in this article. As well, contrary to how it may initially appear, my criticisms of the APA declarations against AI are not because I disagree with their warnings. I simply apply those concerns to therapy itself as well. I do so because I don’t think psychotherapy, innately, has the solutions to human suffering, and indeed, may very well often contribute to it.

The nearly two decades I’ve been involved in mental health work, and the degrees I’ve gotten and am still pursuing, have led me to one inescapable conclusion: the hubris of humanity in thinking they’ve found a single solution to anything is a failure of critical imagination. Mental health is not something to be solved. Your humanity is not something to be considered broken, at war with itself, or separated, parceled out, and commodified through diagnosis.

Will involving AI help with our media-declared mental health “crisis”? Maybe. Maybe not. But if your therapist can be replaced by a bot, any criticism shouldn’t be placed on the bot.

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David

With over 200 articles written, there can be some difficulty in finding ones that are specifically useful on a particular topic or theme. While on occasion I write an article that is time-sensitive, most of what I write is evergreen, e.g., it’s useful no matter when you read it. My focus is on principles rather than pop analysis, though that can certainly be fun and interesting as well.

With that in mind, here is a collection of articles connected by the idea of exploring the mistaken assumption that feelings, thoughts, and values are direct windows onto truth. Feelings are signals pointing to what matters, not verdicts; thoughts are frequently unreliable noise rather than accurate maps; values are the underlying architecture steering every decision, often invisibly; and when a totalizing framework like religious certainty collapses, the predictive “map” itself dissolves, exposing how much of selfhood was constructed rather than discovered.

Read in order, the argument I’m promoting is for treating inner experience as functional and tentative, demanding active interpretation rather than passive trust. This is especially true when coming out of authoritarian ideologies or mindsets that curtailed questions and demanded you think of yourself through a singular lens.

1

2

3

4

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Thanks!

David

Share

Feelings often get bad press, because they are viewed as contrary to, or in opposition to, the supposed pinnacle characteristic of righteous humanity: our rationality. This is not at all an accurate appraisal of what feelings are, but as a socially sanctioned means for avoiding the nature of our humanity, such a view does a really good job.

Let’s consider feelings as part of the continuum in our assessments of the nature of reality, who we are, and as an initial point of reference for how we’re going to behave in support of who we believe ourselves to be.

Read more

This is the first of an ongoing series for Humaty’s Values targeting specific topics and themes for personal development. Each presentation will be approximately 30 minutes long and include handouts and articles for further reading, reflection, and engagement.

The first lesson is free, but the remainder will be for paid subscribers. I want to encourage people to use these as ongoing points of contact for reflection with the general philosophy and principles I write about and teach in therapy and consultation services. Use the lessons in groups, and if that means only one of you has a paid subscription, so be it, though of course I’d greatly appreciate more signing up. The growing online community of paid subscribers is here as well.

If there are any topics you’d like to see covered, reach out and let me know.

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Values Part One Questions

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Values Part Two Questions

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Values Part Three Questions

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Values Light Way

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Values Discussion Questions

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David

In one of the many philosophically laden scenes in the “Matrix” movies, the character Neo is visiting the Oracle to determine whether he has what it takes to be a digital savior for all the mech-using humans currently living in what can only be described as a Titan-sized plumber’s paradise. Seriously, I love sci-fi movies, but the extent of the infrastructure often built in a ridiculously short time truly boggles the mind. No other movie (to my immediate recollection) comes close to “The Minority Report,” where, somehow, vast highways for single-person pod-cars have been built in less than a few decades from the current timeline. I understand that writers lean more toward fiction than science, and maybe putting in ridiculously large infrastructure projects is meant to inspire, but every time I see something like it on screen, I can’t help but laugh at how the show has gone from sci-fi to fantasy.

Back to the Oracle, though I promise the sojourn into a pet peeve concerning sci-fi shows is relevant (mostly), Neo is confronted with the Delphic declaration of “Know Thyself.” Carved into stone at the entrance to Apollo’s temple in Delphi, Greece, the statement can serve as a window into the degree of hubris each civilizational period has contained over the last couple of millennia. To what degree can anyone know themselves? Better, is there a singular self to know? And this will really bake your noodle: is there even a self to know at all?

In Francis Fukuyama’s book “Identity,” he notes a shift in contemporary thinking about the nature of the self, in which the distinction between inner and outer identity has led to a preoccupation with and ascendancy of the so-called inner or authentic self, beyond outward behavior and appearance.

“The foundations of identity were laid with the perception of a disjunction between one’s inside and one’s outside. Individuals come to believe that they have a true or authentic identity hiding within themselves that is somehow at odds with the role they are assigned by their surrounding society. The modern concept of identity places a supreme value on authenticity, on the validation of that inner being that is not being allowed to express itself. ” From: Fukuyama, Francis. “Identity.”

One of the results of this ascendency, as Fukuyama notes as well, is that previously the outer world served as a corrective to inner foolishness. We could imagine any number of things, but in their application, we would have to deal with the rest of reality — since we are not separate from it — which didn’t always follow our desires. Today, that relationship has flipped, such that the inner world has become the repository of truth — what is referred to as positional epistemology or “standpoint theory” — and if the outer world doesn’t conform, then it is at fault.

If you’ve heard the phrase “lived experience,” this is standpoint theory applied to individual psychology. If you’ve heard other phrases like “my truth,” or a preoccupation with supporting statements with “I feel,” this is positional epistemology at work. It is also the predominant tool for much of what passes for mental health therapy these days, alluded to in the declarations of finding the “real you” or “authentic self,” and in the advertising language of “you’re the expert of your own life.”

As one therapist expressed themselves:

This mentality is why people look for therapists who “look like me,” though the end result is that they are also looking for therapists who “think like me” and, most importantly, “validate me.” Carried to the logical — to many a bad word — conclusion, the standard for knowledge being put forward here makes it impossible for anyone to know anyone else. If a therapist has to “examine their own story” (as if there is only one), including delving into “all they had to hide of themselves” (another huge assumption, and if something is known it isn’t hidden, and if it’s hidden then the person doesn’t know it anyway), and only by doing this will they be able to “get” another person, then not only is the work never finished, if the client hasn’t done the same process, they won’t “get” the therapist either.

Note that in this description, the client doesn’t have to do any work, as it is assumed they already know themselves perfectly. They are, as it is often phrased, “experts” of themselves. Making this more confusing is that the statement about the therapist not understanding what meaning the client’s story has for them points to such meaning residing at an “unconscious" level. This means that the meaning is not accessible to the client either, despite later being assured that “you are the only one who knows about you.”

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Some may believe that I cherry-picked a singular comment to make my point, and I assure you, I did not. This is standard fare for therapeutic discourse. The inner world and the subjective have always been part of clinical work, which is why behaviorism sought to codify interventions and outcomes, moving away from the imaginative and non-falsifiable conjectures of psychoanalytic theory. That subjective report is still a part of psychological research is inevitable, since the current state of technology provides no way of mind-reading. The difficulties of subjective reporting, namely that people lie to themselves and to others, are inevitably prone to motivated reasoning, and are often answering different questions than what are actually asked, are all taken into consideration within research. That’s why you won’t, or rather you should never, see a definitive claim from science, particularly the social sciences, and instead every claim is probabilistically understood within narrow parameters.

Unfortunately, the incentives for elevating the subjective are strong, particularly when there’s a parallel push from the industry and elements of society as a whole to avoid discomfort, with validation replacing challenge. This is where you find the self-diagnosis movement in social media postings and increasingly from therapists as well. Here’s another statement from a therapist:

Again, I truly wish this were a minority opinion. Beyond the utter and complete lack of even an attempt at objectivity, this statement is coming from a group that mocks and belittles people from a different ideological bent, relying on their inner certainty when it comes to politically charged issues like COVID and vaccines. The lack of consistency isn’t just a feature of this thinking; it’s a central point. As is the case with so many statements of belief, they are not about articulating how the world works so much as signaling to others of like mind that they belong.

What is lost in all of this is any sense of humility, of a recognition that our biological evolution has only ever been focused on providing good-enough strategies for dealing with environmental constraints. The brain is no different than the rest of the body, despite how many people like to think the mind is somehow different, whether it be seen as the repository of the imago dei in Christian mythology, as possessing the power of context-free free will, or as the location of a singular transcendent self.

That’s something I would be inclined to yell from the rooftops, in the sense that one big barrier to achieving anything in the direction of self-knowledge is hubris, thinking that we do know, often confusing our confidence in our opinions with thinking that confidence is an indication of my degree of correctness. We feel sure, and take that surety itself to be evidence of the truth of what we think. (interview with Mitchell S. Green)

We are a species for which consciousness gives us the illusion of knowing about ourselves more than we actually do. Our rich and varied so-called “inner world” provides the enticements of certainty and emotional weight that Cypher from “The Matrix” is more than willing to step back into, despite doing so meaning he has to kill his friends.

Do any of you truly think you’ve stepped away from biology to not have this be an influence? We as a species have killed one another over religious mythology and imaginary lines drawn on maps. We get angry with people for behavior we imagine they’re doing, and judge ourselves for statements we imagine others are saying. We pretend with one another that the rules of driving are somehow intrinsic to the practice, and curb our behavior because of imagined social judgment about ignoring streetlights, even when nobody is coming from the other direction. We flip switches without — at least most of us — knowing how electricity and electrical engineering work, and push buttons to start cars without knowing how internal combustion engines and the electronics that are now ubiquitous function. We see a lack where there isn’t one and threats where there aren’t any. We mishear conversations all the time, and our memories are reconstructions rather than recollections.

Yet despite all this and so many other examples besides, when it comes to our day-to-day mental declarations, we go full speed ahead, heavily laden with hubris. And now we return to my amusing, to me, criticism of sci-fi movies, and the predilection they have for showcasing a world where the development of social cohesion to make massive infrastructure changes somehow overcame all the restrictions we know exist.

Dipping the toe into fantasy is a sign of that hubris in action, but we enjoy it because it provides hope for a future we’d like to step into. I can appreciate that desire. I’m hardly immune to it. Let’s just try not to mistake the desire for an outcome for what’s actually in front of us, and then not see all the work required to get to even an approximation of it. That’s true of community projects and our personal growth.

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David

Welcome to lesson six, the last module of the class on deconstruction and healing. Here, we focus on what it means to move forward with a full appreciation of all that it means to be human. Flexibility is key. It is the polar opposite of the rigidity of dogma. You are at the mercy of the constraints only of the natural world, and frankly, those limits keep getting pushed back as we collectively explore how nature contains far more than the imaginings of our ancestors.

This journey may mean struggling with disparate ideas. It may mean wrestling with contradictions and learning to be ok with “I don’t know” being a temporary answer. That’s the freedom that a humanistic appraisal of the human experience gives us. A freedom of responsibility, a freedom of connection, a freedom of discovery.

I’m glad you’ve been a part of this journey with me, and I hope you’ll continue learning and sharing with me.

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With every technological advance, there seems to be a not-small number of people who lament what it’s doing to our humanity, and make all manner of declarations to highlight what pieces of ourselves we’re leaving behind. In a few conversational threads on Threads (good marketing name that is), I’ve encountered various forms of how AI is “doing your thinking for you” or “don’t delegate your thinking to an AI.” A great many assumptions underlie these statements, not least the tacit one that AI possesses an agentic consciousness, but also how a thought or series of thoughts somehow become separated from you when using a tool.

The lament is also interesting due to the creeping advance of tech. Thing is, if you’ve ever used spell-check, asked a program to rewrite a sentence or paragraph for you, used Grammarly and other iterations of editing software, or used any amount of other editing software on photos to video, you’ve already “delegated” some of your thinking/activity. Now, before there are screams of how different all of those things are, let’s consider just how we’re delineating those differences.

1. Is it a matter of degree? At what point can you designate the dividing line between the use of a tool and “delegation”? When you open the program? Ask it a question? Is it just checking spelling, or does grammar cross the line? If you can see yourself writing the final realized statement, did you simply skip the line, so to speak? Perhaps with some humility, are you now performatively projecting that you’d have written it eventually anyway?

2. Is it a matter of intent? Are you attempting to imitate what you’re not able to do individually? Is the issue one of using a “cheat” to avoid the work or expenditure of resources elsewhere?

I will note that not a single one of the first set of questions, if you were to remove AI and put in a direct human being into the equation, would be answered as a negative. People have little problem engaging in conversations where there’s a breathing person in front of them, and taking advantage of the ubiquity of different perspectives to develop one’s own thinking. Yet, when it comes to an impersonal tool, somehow we’re losing ourselves.

Delegate your thinking? Are college and trade schools, attended in order to learn things you don’t know and can’t do individually, suddenly bad? What about studying in general? In a very real way, we’re piggybacking off the work of others to expand our perspective and understanding of one or another aspect of reality.

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The second set of questions likely delves deeper into the underlying concern (reminds me of how often people are asked one question and often are simply answering a different more basic one, thank you Kahneman), which is identifying actions associated with cheating or outcomes that are somehow “unearned.” Yes, there’s a very real concern about how AI has generally been trained without compensating the thinkers and artists for the work that, at least initially, AI was trained on. That’s a different concern than I’m focused on here, though I’ve yet to hear from anyone how, now that it’s done, such compensation is at all capable of being enumerated.

The focus here is more on the problem of “delegation.” I touched on this and other points in the previous article, but wanted to drill down a little further about the nature of self, in particular the notion that self is somehow singular and being obscured or denied by the use of technology.

The Robot Takeover

In the final scene of the movie “The Black Hole” released by Disney (I know, it shocks me too) in 1979, also the year I was born, and I’m sure there’s no coincidence, the villain, Dr. Reinhardt, seems to morph together with his robot creation as a testament to his will to live, yet trapped forever within an inhuman experience. Despite being at once utterly bizarre and truly disturbing to this young mind when I first saw the movie, I find that it represents a great deal of what people have in mind when they lament the use of AI in our lives.

There’s a visceral antipathy to the removal of one’s own flesh, as there rightly should be! Replacing it with a metallic substrate is the stuff of horror movies, or, if you’re looking to scar a generation of children, in a Superman movie.

Seriously, who thought kids needed to see that?

Regardless, the horror is real, and anything that bumps up against this removal of the flesh, in part or in whole, is going to have a deep emotional impact. A couple years ago, in an article from Psychology Today, The Illusion of the Modern Self, the author touched on issues related to the redefining of our selves through photo enhancements that, in comparison to what can be done now, seem utterly quaint.

The rise of platforms that can "redefine" our appearance based on existing photographs and transmute our visual self into an array of synthetic identities has ushered in a new existential predicament. This is not mere aesthetic play; this is an engineered mirage, an orchestrated fiction that supplants our empirical reality.

The entirety of this “problem” is the assumption that there’s a singular authentic self that must be kept sacred. “Synthetic identities” not only ignores that identity itself is a co-creative expressive label to show solidarity with an evolving social group, but it also ignores that there must be a person doing the synthesizing. Further, the “mere” in front of “aesthetic” doesn’t really get away from the glaring assumptions, as when do any of the things people have done throughout human history to change their appearance go from “mere” to “existential”? When the first person moved on from fig leaves to animal hides, did someone wonder who they were anymore? When hair and makeup styling went from looking “presentable” (a contextually-dependent word if I’ve ever heard one), to an artistic expression like at the Met Gala, was that an existential bridge too far? I mean, perhaps that’s a bad example, but still.

At no point in human history have we not sought to find new ways of personal expression, and it is through the various iterations of technological development that we have done so. Suddenly I’ve got clothing commercials in my head expressing variations on how the outfits make the person and not the reverse. We even use the metaphorical phrase “a new hat” or “the outfit doesn’t fit you” as an expression of the aesthetic being tied to identity.

But there’s just something scary about AI that goes beyond clothes, makeup, surgery, and implants.

We're buying into an ontological shift—a newly crafted existence made palpable by technology. It is akin to an AI-authored Rorschach Test where the inkblots are replaced by pixels, and the interpretation doesn't disclose your psyche but molds it.

And later…

As we adopt these templates for our offline selves, we may inadvertently contribute to a myth of individuality that is precarious at best. Instead of a spectrum of identities nurtured by authentic experiences and organic development, we are nudged toward ready-made personas, carefully curated by algorithms that have mapped the zeitgeist down to the last pixel.

Here, I think, is where we get to the meat of the matter, this assumption that there’s something indelibly magical about the individual person. Call it a broader version of the “Noble Savage” stereotype, that absurd attempt at lionizing native populations by effectively portraying them in a child-like way. The broader version paints humanity as some pure vessel of creativity, brought low by the venal influences of technology. It’s a Romantic myth, and it’s little wonder such is expressed loudly today with the elevation of the subjective over any attempt at critical appraisal, when truth is contingent upon belonging to the right group rather than based on the strength of one’s argument.

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Your Humanity Isn’t Forgotten

When working with people who have experienced trauma from within religious authoritarian frameworks, one of the most pernicious lies that often becomes very difficult to move beyond, is that their “real” or “authentic” self was tied to the dogma and social group of the believing sect. A way to free oneself from this is to see the underlying lie that supports it: that you’re a singular being for which any deviation makes you deviant. This is fundamentally no different than the declarations being made about AI today.

You haven’t lost your humanity when engaging in new tech, you have instead weighted aspects of it as opposed to others, and by doing so, opened up different avenues of expression. It’s the central point of considering all choices as opportunity costs. The world doesn’t owe you anything. There isn’t some “real you” waiting to be discovered. Every activity shuts down the futures for which a different action would have unveiled. Yes, that can be scary and don’t get me started on the multi-worlds theory of quantum physics, because regardless of if its true, we’re here right now with the threads of our lives being snipped, bounded, and let loose.

Unlike Loki becoming Yggdrasil, the World Tree, we are not at the center of anything, despite the egoistic declarations of centrality that our minds continue to conjure up for us. We are, instead, nodes on a web of biological reality, constantly seeking to extend how we see ourselves and what we may become, through the power of our imagination, centered as it often is, in our technological creations.

Yes, there are threats found in almost any possible thread we pull and follow, but you haven’t at any time left the humanity behind that allows you to weave. Question is: how reflectivey critical are you going to be in the possibilities you do engage in?

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How You Can Support the Newsletter

This post was free to read for all. If you like what I’m doing with The Humanity’s Values Newsletter, and want to support my work, there are several ways you can do it.

1. Like and Restack: Click the buttons at the top or bottom of the page to boost the post’s visibility on Substack.

2. Share: Send the post to friends or share it on social media.

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3. Upgrade to Paid: A paid subscription gets you:

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If you could do any of the above, I’d be very grateful. Readers like you help keep this newsletter going and growing.

Thanks!

David

Lesson five of deconstruction and healing is all about relational meaning-making. Fundamentally, we are social creatures because that’s exactly how evolution made us as biological animals bound within a naturalistic reality. Rather than being a limitation, this is exactly how we touch upon the infinite. There is simply no end to what can be created when two or more people are gathered together.

This lesson has a couple of worksheets that help you to direct attention towards practical actions of expanding how you see the world and how you connect with others. All of the philosophy will only get you so far. You have to go out and live your life.

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There’s a lot of hubaloo about what AI and its kissing-cousin in the form of chatbots, is doing to us, and while I have a certain reticence, as anyone does when faced with something new, about what the future holds with this new technology, I’m consistently struck by the assumptions people carry that aren’t being questioned. We still operate as if some “core” self is under threat, and that technology, in whatever form, is somehow removing us from who we are “meant to be,” through the evil machinations of capitalism, or whatever other boogeyman people have created by giving agency to labels. I can’t help but wonder when the first neanderthal figured out fire, whether there was a group even then lamenting the loss of their humanity, and gathered in their echo-caves to figure out how to get rid of this scary thing. Sure, fire had a lot of destructive capability, but it also created the glory that is medium-rare steak, so all in all, I think we came out ahead.

The Definition and Nature of Self

The question of what constitutes the self is not an abstract philosophical puzzle reserved for academics, however much I appreciate the ever-growing list of published books on the subject. It is the practical problem every person walks into a therapist’s office carrying, often without knowing it. Who am I when my relationships end? When my religion fails me? When my body changes, my career collapses, or my certainties dissolve? The urgency underneath those questions is the same in each case: there must be something here, some center that persists, and I need to find it to be authentically “me.”

The answer that psychology as a discipline, and most people, has typically defaulted to is the one manifested within dualistic religious traditions, and for individuals, this is true often regardless of whether the person is still a religious believer or not. That answer? The self is a fixed, bounded interior thing. It is a self that exists behind the eyes, a core homunculus, separable from the world around it. This picture carries with it th power of intuition and how people relate to their “lived experience,” but it is more myth than science, and it creates more problems than it solves. If the self is a static container, singular and found in some imagined “core,” then change becomes threat rather than possibility. This is undoubtedly why so many who have left religion, and many others besides, delve into personal therapy to find their “authentic self,” or lament that some ideology kept them from being “true” to who they “really are.” The idea throughout becomes a quest of restoring some pure original state, a personalized Garden of Eden, rather than discovering the flexibility that nature has provided.

A more accurate account begins with the recognition that selfhood is relational and contextual from the start. To paraphrase Daniel Siegel: the mind (or self) is better defined as a process for the regulation of energy and information within our bodies and within our relationships, an emergent process that gives rise to our mental activities such as thinking, emotion, and the memories that provide the structure of who we believe ourselves to be. This, combined with the notion of predictive processing as it relates to cognition, means that each of us is actively constructing the world through which we act and project ourselves into, based on our own idiosyncratic histories.

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The self is not a thing that encounters experience from outside; it is constituted through experience, through the web of relationships, cultural inheritances, embodied sensations, and narrative frameworks we are embedded in from birth. We can use the metaphor of a loom where if someone were to pull a single thread — genetics, childhood attachment, cultural membership — at no point would you have explained the whole person. Instead, you’ve simply isolated one strand from the weave that that the autobiographical self emerges from.

This is why reducing the self to any single variable is always an epistemic failure, and why the diagnostic habit of collapsing a person’s full complexity into a label can result in real harm. What persists through the variable contexts of life is not a fixed thing but much more like an orientation or perspective: values instantiated through behavior, relationships, and commitments that constitute identity through action rather than through some form of essence.

The Theory of Extended Mind

In 1998, philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers published a paper that asked a deceptively simple question: where does the mind stop and the world begin? Their answer was that the boundary is far less fixed than we habitually assume. Cognitive processes are not confined to the skull. When we use a notebook to remember appointments, the notebook is doing genuine cognitive work. When we manipulate physical objects to solve a spatial problem, the environment is part of the process of creating understanding. The mind extends into the world, as we are embedded and embodied within it, through the tools, symbols, and relationships that extend our functioning.

We’ve always been tool-extended creatures. My humor, at least funny to me, at the beginning concerning the discovery of fire, is simply a beginning point example. It’s an example so integral to the picture we have of ourselves as human beings that the myth of Prometheus stands as a testament to when homo sapiens became what it is. Fire as the metaphor for knowledge, and by extension technological development, has always carried within it the duality of destruction and progress. We move forward in our creativity by projecting a critical awareness, and extending our capacity for change and development. Writing extends our memory. Clocks extend our temporal reasoning. Lakoff and Johnson’s ‘cognitive metaphor theory’ is fundamentally based on an extension of a body/mind embedded within nature. Tools do not replace cognitive functioning, they restructure the system as a whole, making new forms of thinking possible that could not have existed without it.

Clark and Chalmers remind us that the boundary between self and world is permeable, negotiated, and functionally defined. A blind person’s cane is not merely a tool they use (most especially if you’re a superhero named Daredevil); after sufficient practice, it becomes part of their perceptual system, transmitting information to them about the world. Cognitive extension is about functional expansion.

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This matters for how we understand the relationship between our contextual selves and the tools we employ. The self, in its many iterations, is not compromised by extension; it is expressed through it. Values do not stay locked inside the person; they propagate outward through behavior, relationships, and the tools we choose to use. The question is never whether extension happens, but whether the means we expand ourselves carries the values and commitments we want to stay connected to, or whether it distorts and displaces them.

AI as a Tool for Expanding What We Already Believe

The diagram above is the argument I’m presenting. AI is simply the latest in a string of tools we’ve developed as a human species. Our AI-expanded capacity is not the most meaningful thing to focus on (though for certain we should have conversations about it). Rather, where the contextual self meets artificial capability, is where we should be more focused on, and it is the area where the assumptions about what we are and how we think have the most consequences. As with any tool, the issue is extended agency. Agency means that that who we are, our human context, remains the author. The tool serves us. It does not replace the author. Though admittedly, as with any tool, we can use it in such a way that the result is our annihilation, as it is with nuclear fission and whether abundant energy is our future or self-destruction through weaponization.

AI systems do not generate beliefs out of thin air and transfer them into users, any more than a hammer forces the person wielding it to do so in a particular way. As anyone who has smashed a finger knows, the tool doesn’t come with an automatic download of instructions.

What AI does is process, organize, synthesize, and articulate the frameworks the person using it brings. This is functionally no different than a conversation with another human being. When a person of intellectual rigor and education uses a language model to explore an idea, what comes back is, hopefully, if the “conversation” was done well, further refined. The self’s orientation and all the variables person brings to the interactive space, directs the process. The tool provides reach, not direction. This is where the ongoing expansion of detecting whether a person uses AI is getting ridiculous. Because it uses good writing principles, like the rule of three, there are people claiming that if they see it being used, the result must have been an AI, regardless of whether the person is an established author and knows what they’r doing.

The contextual self persists. AI extends our capacity, but it doesn’t replace what we’ve brought to the relational space. What can be outsourced is the labor of articulation, the breadth of pattern-matching, the synthesis of researched sources. This is useful, even as it brings with it unique difficulties associated with the tool.

The Limits That a Lack of Self-Critical Awareness Brings

Here is the uncomfortable part of AI extending ourselves: what if you’re an asshole or an idiot, or, to be more kind, varying degrees of ignorant? If the amplification depends entirely on the quality of the beliefs brought to it, there are a lot of really bad and misinformed beliefs. A tool that extends critical inquiry produces insight, at least in theory. A tool that extends the reach of unexamined assumptions, biases, and self-serving narratives feeds the expansion of ignorance to a place where it resists correction precisely because it has started sounding more intelligent.

The ‘fundamental attribution error’ is a bedrock cognitive heuristic or bias where we excuse our own bad choices using external variables while attributing the same behavior in others to fixed internal defects. We rationalize our behavior by constructing narratives that make sense within a world that, through an avoidance of discomfort, we don’t want to question. This is the normal operation of a cognitive system designed to act quickly with incomplete information. The problem is that such a system, left unexamined, generates a self-concept that is largely a manifestation of that other most basic of heuristics or biases: confirmation.

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The self that lacks self-critical awareness does not experience itself as distorted. It experiences itself as simply seeing things clearly. Our values feel obvious rather than chosen, or contextually provided, and our blind spots are by definition invisible. This is the psychological condition in which any tool use, though it would seem particulatly that of AI, perhaps because it mimics agency so much better than a hammer ever will, becomes genuinely dangerous. Cognitive bias scaled up by a large language model does not become less biased; it becomes more persuasive.

There is no built-in process for criticism like there is in scientific disciplines. Self-criticism is possible, but it is a constant choice to engage in, and given our predilection to avoid discomfort, it’s a choice that almost never feels good to pursue. The questioning, the deconstruction of received frameworks, the honest reckoning with one’s motivated reasoning. Without that work, what gets extended by using AI is the illusion of reflection, when truly they are thinking in circles, but more efficiently.

In using AI, we should be cultivating uncertainty as a cognitive virtue rather than a defect to be resolved. We should approach our values and beliefs with the same exploratory spirit one would want to bring to any serious inquiry. This means, to use a frequent phrase in the land of therapy, doing the work, where technological tools serve discovery rather than merely accelerate the defense of what was already assumed.

Let’s get back to the loom (and incidentally why I call my therapeutic and coaching business “Life Weavings”). Each life is a complex interplay of many threads, and to pluck just one will never give you the full picture. The same is true of using AI. The full picture, or at least a fuller one, requires the willingness to look at the whole weave, to notice which threads have been avoided, which ones are tangled, and which ones you have been quietly refusing to examine.

That willingness will not be provided by AI (at least not yet). It is the profound expressive contribution of a self that has chosen, through sustained effort and honest questioning, to remain in relationship with its own uncertainty. To find that a sense of wonder means wading through the discomfort of what isn’t known.

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Lesson four of deconstruction and healing expands on the ethics and morality we covered previously, seeing how ethics is the bedrock for how we create meaning and purpose in our lives. Just as you were deciding what is good and right as a believer, so now you’re doing the same, and nothing has changed except the realization that the god you thought was real isn’t.

The responsibility rests on you. That’s the message of humanism and a naturalistic ethics. The universe isn’t going to show up for you more than it already has, in providing everything needed to choose the direction of your life, and deal with the consequences of every cost/benefit and opportunity cost that a decision has.

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This is a longer version of a presentation I gave at the Religious Trauma Symposium at Harvard a few weeks ago. The event aimed to shed light on the genuine concerns and experiences that individuals within religious communities, particularly fundamentalist groups, have faced. It also fostered dialogue between academic and clinical communities to explore effective ways of addressing the needs of those who are suffering.

The presentation here is an ongoing development of a paradigm for comprehending the trauma that arises within a religious context, particularly when individuals leave the structure it provides. This is not to mean that trauma doesn’t occur within religious environments, as it most certainly does, and such destabilizing elements further the identified difficulties that lead to and are then heightened when leaving. These difficulties are exacerbated by the degree to which the religious community exhibits control over various areas of a person’s life. That degree of control is, to me, the definitive element that differentiates a religion from a cult.

The development of this paradigm is also not solely connected to trauma that occurs within a religious context. It is an attempt to provide a means of understanding what happens anytime a person’s worldview is threatened and/or undergoing change. Our brains, fundamentally operating as predictive biological machines, are constantly running potential scenarios to manage resources and test reality. Religion simply exists on one end of a spectrum for the disruption that occurs, but it is not the only structure for which disruption happens.

Challenging what we believe is an essential component of an emotionally fulfilling life, and the discomfort that arises from doing so serves as a poignant reminder that our minds are perpetually in need of continuous growth and resilience.

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David

Lesson three of deconstruction and healing is about that very thing you’re warned about in leaving religion, the thing the authoritarians declare you’ll never find, and will ultimately result in heinous acts of debauchery. Ethics and morality.

While certainly many behaviors you may get up to in your secular life could be and likely are considered acts of debauchery, they are anything but heinous, and you are still very much living a life aligned with your values.

This is a lesson I write about quite often, so I encourage you to read the many articles that exist on values, but when it comes to religious deconversion, values are especially important precisely because the religious think they own them. Spoiler: they do not.

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Lesson two of the journey of deconstruction touches on probably one of the hardest subjects and the most prone to philosophical confusion, the nature of the self. This isn’t a mere dive into Buddhism, as so many atheists end up doing, but a reflection on what it means to be a human being bound within biology and embedded in an evolutionary history. A great many religious ideas are easy to fall into and difficult to get out of precisely because they make a certain intuitive sense from how we feel ourselves to be in the world. Those intuitions are not only false, they contribute to a lot of needless hurt, and get in the way of a journey out of religious ideology.

This lesson contains a couple of articles to go over to hopefully flesh out even further the presentation. Ultimately, you don’t need to understand all the ins and outs of a philosophy of the flesh, but learning to distance yourself from your own thoughts and see yourself as more than one thing can be extraordinarily freeing and is a distinct contrast from the notion of sin that Christianity teaches.

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Lesson one begins our journey by recognizing that whatever god you believed in never existed in the first place. The deity didn’t suddenly disappear when you stopped believing or left your religious identity. Nor did the deity exist when you were a believer.

This seems like a simple point to make, but far too often, people start their process of moving on from religion with the idea that they’re starting from scratch, or starting over, and that everything they thought prior needs to be cleansed or washed away. Which sounds remarkably like the original conversion story so many were sold. Such a framework was nonsense then, and it’s ridiculous now.

Because a deity never existed, the person making all the decisions, deciding what was right and wrong, who to relate to, and how to show up in the daily decisions of every day of a life, was you. Just you. The authority figure(s) you connected to have changed, but not the fact that you were deciding to say yes to them. The incentives that supported different decision-making have changed, but not the fact that it’s you who gives those incentives meaning.

Take back the power that never left you.

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Whether sitting down for coffee, watching a form of media, or engaging in an online discussion, there’s no interaction where the potential of who I become next isn’t being molded. That’s the reality of a connected life, one where a myriad of different variables are all working with varying levels of emotional weight to shape the possibilities of who you and I will become, but also the lens through which we even see those possibilities. My perspective, and every one that each person has, of the world is both inevitable and a limitation. Inevitable because not having a perspective is utterly impossible, and a limitation because I can’t step outside of it. “Taking another’s perspective” has always been a fiction, as you can’t leave your own conscious experience. This is why mind-reading is also a fiction. You can’t leave yourself behind.

This is why experiential flexibility is so important, because there are innumerable other possible lenses for viewing my experiences. The greater number of data for my mind to draw from in shaping possibilities is a net gain for expanding the web of perception. In fact, think of that web being spun by a spider. If the threads only ever intersected at one point, not only is there a single point of failure, but because of that the whole structure is inherently unstable. The more lines that cross, the more nodes are created, and the greater stability that is built.

Every instance of miscommunication is an example pointing towards the inescapable conclusion that we neither can read another’s mind nor step outside of our own projection. Each person exists in our minds as a facsimile of who they are. Hence, humility is important because we never have all the information needed to complete a whole picture. As well, coming back to the web analogy, looking at someone through a single node or intersecting point is a recipe for bigotry, a lack of awareness concerning one’s own biases, and an unstable and limited picture of who that person is.

That inability to fully grasp the whole of another person is why dialogue and writing are important, if not necessary, for one’s own healthy development. Therapists often point to the power of journaling, but the practice is helpful largely because it makes concrete the limitations of our own thought. When we look back at what we’ve written, we should be able to do so with a head-shaking grin at the hubris that existed. The problems we thought were insurmountable eventually became commonplace. The things we found important ended up becoming less so. How we judged ourselves, hopefully, has become different.

This is what, in part, drives me to write and share within this digital world. I could stay within the confines of my immediate surroundings, interact only with work colleagues, friends, and only those who agree with me (extraordinarily limited such a group may be), and yes, each of these visions of our shared world would and are worth exploring, but the digital world has opened up a potential market of perspectives that borders on gluttony. When faced with such a bounty and working within the acknowledgement that vision is an active engagement, exploring different understandings of the world is like going from a flashlight to a lantern in a dark room.

As Jacob Bronowski notes:

"But we are in any case mistaken if we think of our picture of the world as a passive record. The picture is made by, it is made of, our activity, all the way from the logic of the brain to the use of the plow and the wheel. It is the implication and the expression, in symbolic form, of all our dealings with nature. The picture is not the look of the world but our way of looking at it: not how the world strikes us but how we construct it. (The Identity of Man)"

Be careful, though, as the enlightened room may not look entirely the way you initially thought it would be when you only had a flashlight. We are not passive recipients of the world we are embedded and embodied in, but co-creatively determining what we each identify as evidence for the opinions we believe are true, and therefore, the shape of things we believe we’re dealing with is equally so. Each public offering of writing is not simply a declaration of my own view; it's a request for and a seeking of continued engagement with the world. It’s a way of yelling into the cave and seeing what the echoes reveal.

If all the potential perspectives of the world were a pie, mine is an infinitesimally small slice, though no less important because of it. Certainly not to me, though of course I almost have to say that, don’t I? This isn't an equality of truth claims, but a recognition of the equality in our inevitable creation of perspective. It’s a major reason why the internet and social media are so enticing, as they’re a technological expansion of what we all feel as biological perspective makers: my view matters.

The drive for perspective making can be curtailed by insularity or expanded through challenging engagement. An honest, though likely uncomfortable, understanding of life, my place in it and as it, and my connection within it grows not in the echo-chamber of my own mind, but in every contact with another degree of perspective.

Again from Bronowski:

"Our experiences do not merely link us to the outside world; they are us, and they are the world for us; they make us part of the world. We get a false picture of the world if we regard it as a set of events that have their own absolute sequence and that we merely watch. (The Identity of Man)"

Whether it be explorations of politics, spirituality, psychology, or the social movements I find fascinating, all is done within a consideration of the active link I have with the shared humanity engaged in the same enterprise. It’s one of the central reasons I left the pursuit of theology and moved into psychology, because the former centered knowledge on a single perspective, and the latter has become an ongoing reminder that we should see the human striving behind every idea, opinion, and exclamation. Sometimes for good. Sometimes for ill. But always the striving remains.

Follow me on Threads or Instagram for more psychology, humor, and photography.

How You Can Support the Newsletter

This post was free to read for all. If you like what I’m doing with The Humanity’s Values Newsletter, and want to support my work, there are several ways you can do it.

1. Like and Restack: Click the buttons at the top or bottom of the page to boost the post’s visibility on Substack.

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3. Upgrade to Paid: A paid subscription gets you:

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Thanks!

David

Welcome to module 4 of “Accepting Your Anger.” This is the last module in the class, but that doesn’t mean it’s the last lesson to learn. One of the purposes of how I teach is to base things on principles, so that you can go over them as often as you’d like, and that their application is specific to each person. If I simply told you what to do, not only would that be a level of arrogance I hope I don’t possess, but it wouldn’t be you living your life anymore. Most likely, you came here not wanting anger to take you over anymore, so why would I simply seek to take its place?

In looking to pursue new behavior, we come to the last part of the path to gaining a better understanding of what emotions are and how they work. By identifying what matters to you, your Values, and exploring the Narratives that structure your life, Behavior becomes the means through which you support both Values and Narratives in a more directed, conscious, and deliberate way.

You don’t get away from consequences, but instead take ownership of what consequences you’re willing to live with.

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